Munder Difflin
by Chaitanya Giri
“The world’s best agents. The world’s worst paper company.” A local-first multi-agent harness that wraps the terminal coding CLIs you already run, gives each one memory and a mailbox, and seats them as avatars on a 2D office floor coordinated by your clone.
See https://munderdiffl.in/ · source at https://github.com/chaitanyagiri/munder-difflin
Licence — confirmed
GitHub’s licence detector reports “Other” for this repo, which is misleading. Read from source, the position is:
| Component | Licence |
|---|---|
| Source code | MIT — Copyright (c) 2026 Chaitanya Giri |
Bundled pixel-art tilesets in src/renderer/src/assets/ | LimeZu “Complete Version” — separate, purchased 2026-08-20 |
| The Office cast sprites and portraits | MIT — drawn procedurally in scene/office/portraitArt.ts (591 lines), no third-party claim |
| Vendored tileset/map scaffolding | from shahar061/the-office, project code ISC |
The detector returns “Other” because LICENSE is standard MIT text plus an appended scope note carving out the art, so it is not a byte-exact match.
The attribution obligation is live
The LimeZu licence permits editing and use in commercial and non-commercial projects, and forbids reselling. It requires credit linking to https://limezu.itch.io/, and the project states that link must remain in the README acknowledgements, the app’s about/credits surface, and the website. Removing it breaks the licence. If you fork or redistribute this, that obligation travels with you — the MIT grant on the code does not cover the art.
The cast was once recoloured from LimeZu walk sheets; those were deleted on 2026-08-20 once nothing referenced them, which is why the sprites are now clean-room. Munder Difflin is an affectionate parody and is not affiliated with NBC’s The Office.
What it is
A desktop app that treats real terminal-agent CLI processes as the unit of work. Each spawned agent is a genuine CLI process with its own filesystem, system prompt and hook lifecycle — not an API wrapper. Munder Difflin layers coordination on top and renders the result as a Sims-like office floor where you watch avatars work at desks.
The one agent you talk to is Michael, “your clone” — a supervisor that routes work to the others. The pitch is that he keeps working while you are away, on the subscriptions and hourly limits you already pay for.
Supported CLIs
Twelve wrapped agent CLIs, confirmed in source: claude (Claude Code), agy (Antigravity/Gemini), codex (Codex), grok, kimi, gemini, qwen, opencode (OpenCode), crush, pi (Pi), copilot, cursor — plus bring-your-own keys and local LLMs.
The Hive — how coordination works
HIVE.md is unusually candid about naming its own patterns rather than inventing vocabulary. Five classic mechanisms are composed:
| Behaviour | Pattern |
|---|---|
| Per-agent memory file created at spawn, which the agent reads and updates | Agent long-term memory (MemGPT/Letta-style self-managed) |
| Writing a requirement into another agent’s file | Stigmergy — coordinating by modifying a shared environment |
| A shared plan multiple agents edit | Blackboard architecture (Hearsay-II) |
| “Check after finishing every task” | Mailbox / actor model — drain an inbox at a lifecycle point |
| A “god” agent that runs the floor and clarifies for others | Orchestrator / supervisor (LangGraph-supervisor-style) |
The project names Stanford’s Generative Agents (Park et al., 2023) as its closest academic analogue — memory stream, retrieval, reflection and planning behind 2D avatars — which is a fair self-description.
Memory is plain markdown: hiveMemory(id) returns the literal contents of agents/<id>/memory.md. A planned Command Center graph tab draws agents as nodes and inter-agent messages as edges, with memory topics as an optional second layer.
Architecture
Electron + React + TypeScript, with Pixi.js for the office floor, xterm.js for the terminals and node-pty for the processes. 221 TS/TSX files, ~64k lines. Local state in better-sqlite3. Version 0.4.6, explicitly badged pre-release; macOS, Windows and Linux.
package.json is marked "private": true — this is a packaged desktop app, not an npm library.
Superpowers
The genuinely interesting bet is that the terminal CLI is the right abstraction for a multi-agent system. Rather than reimplementing agents against provider APIs, it spawns the CLIs you already have configured and authenticated, which means your existing subscriptions and rate limits carry over and each agent inherits its CLI’s full tool surface for free.
The second is that the visualisation is not just whimsy. Multi-agent systems fail in ways that are hard to see in logs — an agent idling on a question, two agents fighting over the same file. Seating them on a floor where you can see who is stalled makes that legible, which is the same insight behind herdr’s status sidebar, solved with a very different aesthetic.
Caveats
- Pre-release (0.4.6) and moving fast; the badge says so explicitly.
- The art licence is a real obligation, not a formality — see above. This is the single most important thing to know before forking.
- Novelty-to-substance ratio needs judging for yourself. It hit #1 GitHub Trending and #5 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, which selects for charm as much as utility. The engineering underneath is real, but a 2D office of Office characters is a strong aesthetic commitment to inherit.
- Docs are written in-universe —
MEMORY_GRAPH_SPEC.mdis bylined “author: Jim” and marked “awaiting god sign-off”. Charming, but note the git history is human-authored (chaitanyagiridominates), so the in-universe bylines reflect the project’s roleplay convention and dogfooding, not autonomous authorship. - Telemetry exists — there is a dedicated
TELEMETRY.md; read it before deploying somewhere sensitive.
Pricing
Free and open source. Source code MIT; you pay only for the agent subscriptions and API keys you already hold. The bundled art carries its own licence with a mandatory credit.
Related
- herdr — the closest sibling: also coordinates many coding-agent CLIs, but as a terminal multiplexer with a status sidebar rather than a 2D game world
- WeSight — the third approach: an Electron GUI console that owns the conversation with each agent
- Claude Code vs Codex vs Goose vs Hermes vs Pi — the agents being wrapped
- Multi-Agent Systems — the orchestration patterns
HIVE.mdnames explicitly - Claude Code · Codex · OpenCode · Pi — wrapped CLIs